Japan begins mega-rollout of 100 million+ national IDs The Japanese government has launched the nation's first national identification system for social security and taxation purposes, despite widespread grumbling from its ageing population. Residents of Japan, including foreigners, are being assigned unique 12-digit numbers as of Monday under the new My Number identification …
When I was young we all used to believe that our politicians and public administrators here in the UK were incompetent. The death of GOV.UK Verify RIP suggests that there is no reason to change that belief.
We also used to believe that the politicians and public administrators in other countries were better than ours. We were jealous of them.
Looking at this Japanese My Number initiative, for example, and the Indian Aadhaar disaster and Estonia, that jealousy was, in retrospect, entirely wasted.
We'll have to find out from Mr Worstall at the Weekend what a " debt per GDP ratio" is before anyone can answer your question.
The Economist used to tell me that the Japanese are very keen savers, their problem is the reverse of debt, they won't spend (apart from recently buying the FT) and when economic growth stopped that led to deflation which made them even less inclined to spend which shrank the economy further and every political attempt to reverse that unhappy spiral has failed.
Meanwhile, back to the My Number card. My Number system raises red flags in Japan ahead of notice release in the Asia Times highly recommended – a master class in bathos:
• The Japanese government is "determined to accurately explain the merits of the system".
• "The issue of how children are to use the cards is another matter to consider".
• "It is also unclear whether all the terminals necessary to scan My Number information will have been installed in retailers in time for the start of the system ... Moreover, who is to pay for the machines’ installation has yet to be decided".
• "It also seems likely that the cards will be difficult to use at food vendors or for services such as take-out delivery".
• "That said, the system is not without its merits ... Receiving natural-disaster relief will also become smoother ...".
Until we chip every human issuing cards is pointless. They'll get lost or stolen, and used fraudulently and only the criminal will profit.
Chip everyone and be done with it. What could possibly go wrong...
Exactly my thoughts! The chip would be readable by a cheap scanner, and would contain information on your birth date, race/religion, political affiliations/associations, creditworthiness, academic degrees, etc.
> the rollout would usher in "a more efficient, egalitarian society"
Back in the early 1900's, it was thought that only a full-blown revolution by a Communist movement could achieve such a thing. Now all that is required is to issue an id card - my how the world has progressed.
This is basically like a national insurance or social security number at the moment. I suspect the way things work at the moment is a massive pain in the ass to administrate and causes a ton of head ache.
The income tax office knows someone with your name and your current or maybe 10 years previous address, filled or had filled for them a tax return at some point. They apparently pass on the income details for people to their city or town office based on the name and rough address and then that office sends out local tax, health insurance etc details. For me the tax office keep sending stuff to an address I moved from over a year ago even after telling them the change of address (good on JP for forwarding everything for so long) but that address is different from the address that I have registered at the town office... I suspect because of my foreign name they can work out how to sort it out but I imagine them messing stuff up for people that have common names and the income tax office sends income information to the wrong city or town office fairly often.
TL;DR; version - Japan gets NI numbers that make the interlinked public systems a little less fragile. Not the end of the world or some plan to document all the evil foreigners or whatever.
Decades ago, Westerners in Japan noted that every now and then a police official would come to your door and ask who was living in your apartment/house. Answering was not optional. Every neighbourhood had its policeman in a box who knew where everybody lived and would happily give directions - useful in a country that never went for street names or house numbers. This is just Japan 3.0.
According to the JT, the government argued that the risk of "bulk information leaks under the new system will be low because management of information will not be centralised but divided among agencies."
No, the risks will be higher because different agencies will choose different safeguards and procedures, some inevitably of lower standard than others. There will be more room for mistakes in practice, and a greater opportunity for the bad guys to hit one agency hard since it will have a lower level of resources to protect itself than if all were acting as a whole. Decentralising it does limit the breadth of any single leak, but it makes a leak more likely.
There's a fabulous opportunity here to leverage national scale smartcard technology to head off the sorts of exposures of citizen identities suffered in Korea and the USA.
See "Safeguarding the pedigree of personal attributes" at http://lockstep.com.au/blog/2014/09/01/pedigree-of-ids
The root cause of much identity theft and fraud today is the sad fact that IDs, customer reference numbers and attributes generally are so easy to copy and replay without permission and without detection. Simple numerical attributes like social security numbers, bank account numbers and health IDs can be stolen from many different sources, and replayed with impunity in bogus transactions.
Our personal data nowadays is leaking more or less constantly, through breached databases, websites, online forms, call centres and so on, to such an extent that customer reference numbers on their own are no longer reliable. Privacy consequentially suffers because customers are required to assert their identity through circumstantial evidence, like name and address, birth date, mother’s maiden name and other pseudo secrets. All this data in turn is liable to be stolen and used against us, leading to spiraling identity fraud.
To restore the reliability of personal attribute data, we need to know their pedigree. We need to know that a presented data item is genuine, that it originated from a trusted authority, it’s been stored safely by its owner, and it’s been presented with the owner’s consent. If confidence in single attributes can be restored then we can step back from all the auxiliary proof-of-identity needed for routine transactions, and thus curb identity theft.
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